Stuffed Bears, Coffee Beans and Mobile Apps

I’ve had a lot of coffee shop meetings lately.  In the Twin Cities, we have three major coffee shops with multiple locations: Starbucks, Caribou Coffee and Dunn Bros. Each has put significant effort into standardizing the store environment to create a certain atmosphere. Starbucks is Starbucks – trendy “Seattle-hip” styling, cool music, and baristas in green aprons.  Caribou, started in Minnesota and pays homage to this heritage with its “up-north cabin” décor: fireplaces, exposed, faux ceiling beams and comfy chairs with a stuffed animal black bear you can use as a footstool. Dunn Bros (pronounced Dunn Brothers even though you never see the “Bros” spelled out) is another Minnesota original whose focus is all about the freshness of the coffee.  Each store has a working bean roaster out in the open with burlap sacks of coffee beans lying around as if someone just hauled them in from a wooden ship in the harbor. Despite the fact that the nearest ocean port is more than a thousand miles away, you do get the feeling you are getting the freshest possible cup of coffee, especially when you see a worker dump beans into the roaster.

These stores have gone to great effort to make the coffee shop experience every bit as much of their brand as the coffee itself.  They’ve recognized that differentiating on the coffee alone isn’t enough because few (if any) can really taste the difference.  So the product – coffee – isn’t really the product; the whole experience is. From the chipper barista to the eco-friendly stir sticks and loyalty programs, all are pieces that fit together to create the experience and reinforce the brand. 

Enter the mobile app. 

Just a couple years ago no one could imagine any reason a coffee shop would have a mobile app.  Pay for coffee with your phone?  So what!  Locate the closest shop? Finding a coffee shop is almost as challenging as finding a fire hydrant. Yet for many, the mobile app has become so integrated into the experience that it now enhances the brand.  Not having one might actually be harmful.

Starbucks and Dunn Bros. both have mobile apps, Caribou does not.  There is a utility to both the Starbucks and Dunn Bros. apps – you can pay with your phone.  So what, who doesn’t carry a wallet and credit cards?  Then why have some begun to avoid Caribou specifically because they don’t have an app?  Recently, I found several other “Caribou avoiders” in a Starbucks line and asked them.  The consensus: the integration of the mobile app payment and the loyalty program. Customers I talked to saw carrying a loyalty card or waiting while the cashier looked up their number to be an annoyance greater than the reward of a future free coffee.

Many marketers think about mobile apps as just a gimmicky way for customers to do things they can already do: find a location, check store hours, etc. But Starbucks and Dunn Bros. didn’t simply think about utility (payment), they thought about the experience. They didn’t think about getting money from the customer, they thought about making it easier for customers to participate in the loyalty program, which, in turn gives them information about customers’ buying habits. That information is used to improve the customer experience.

Many companies are jumping on the “app” bandwagon and many have limited their thinking to things you can already do without an app.  So many in fact, Apple now requires proof that an app provides functionality beyond that of a web browser before they will let it into the App Store.  Companies can learn a lot from Starbucks and Dunn Bros about how to make the app part of the experience and part of the product.

Starbucks continues to look at ways to integrate their mobile platform into the customer experience. A spokesperson confirmed they will begin testing mobile ordering in a few markets by the end of the year.  For people like me who are a little less than chatty before my first cup of java, this could mean making my selection and paying on my Starbucks app from my favorite table in the corner.  Ah, coffee without human interaction. For me, the perfect experience… even without the stuffed black bear.

Oldies but Goodies

Sorry if you received notifications today about NEW blog posts from me only to find out they they are OLD blog posts.  I discovered that all of my previous posts disappeared for unknown reasons.  Rather than accept defeat at the hands of technology, I re-posted them. 

Go ahead - read them again!

5 Myths of B2B Social Media

The volume of the buzz around social media in B2B marketing continues to increase. According to a January 2012 report “The State of Social Media Marketing” by Awareness, Inc., 70% of businesses surveyed said they plan to do more with social media in the coming year.  But despite all the talk and momentum, there is little evidence that social media has any measurable impact on business, apart from taking more time and energy than was planned.

This is not to say that social media should not be used in B2B marketing.  The point is that like any other marketing tactic, companies need to carefully consider exactly what they are willing to put into it, and what they expect to get out of it.

Here are five common myths about B2B social media to consider before developing your plan:

1. It’s cheap and easy.  It’s neither. The same Awareness, Inc. report I mentioned above states that 77% of business lack sufficient resources for social media. Content gets stale very quickly in the online world so companies need to dedicate the time and resources necessary to keep it fresh.  This can’t be the sole responsibility of the marketing department, or worse, a single person in the marketing department.  It takes an across the board commitment from all potential content generators.  That commitment needs to be made before you launch.

2. We need to do it because everyone else is. Lack of purpose will waste resources. Social media is a tactic just like any other business tactic.  It is impossible to measure the ROI or effectiveness of a tactic if the goal is unclear.  It has been said that 80% of marketers begin with tactics rather than the goals, especially with regard to social media.  When you develop your marketing plan you will identify your target and your key messages. Don’t bypass the critical step of understanding how you will reach your target.  Ultimately, social media is about reaching your target. It is important to really understand how (and if) your target uses social media sources in their purchase decision.  Skipping this step is like making an ad buy without any concern for the specific media or timing.

3. The more the better. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Pintrest, Slideshare and on and on.  A “spread the peanut butter” social media strategy usually results stale peanut butter everywhere.  If you are effectively targeting and you truly understand where your targets are in the social mediasphere, you shouldn’t need to be everywhere. 

4. It’s one-way communication.  I often hear companies say they want to use social media as a mechanism to build their credibility as a “thought leader.”  This can be effective with lots of good, valuable content. But don’t forget that almost all social media is a dialog.  There is a great snapshot of a blog post where the first comment was “Very interesting, please have one of your sales people call me.”  Of course, the next comment is posted six weeks later by the same person and reads, “Never mind, I guess you guys are to busy talking about your product to sell it.  I bought from your competitor.” Obviously, few would expect a sales lead to pop directly out of blog post but it raises the bigger issue that many companies do not effectively plan for return communication.  It is critical to be ready for all types of responses: leads, upset customers, competitors, challenges to your content, etc.

Perhaps more importantly, think about how you can use social media to engage customers and prospects in a dialog.  We want to be seen as the thought leaders, but what can we learn from our customers and prospects?  Think of it this way, if we are targeting the right audience, they hold all of the knowledge about how to better meet their needs.  If they are willing to talk to us, we should listen.

5. Traffic = ROI. There is so much good, free content available today it very easily gets devalued and disassociated from its supplier.  For example, in the writing of this blog post I have searched and found at least three pieces of information and a cartoon.  All of it was offered for free and none of it will lead to me (or any of you) purchasing anything. This point ties back to effective targeting and understanding how (or if) your buyer will use information gained from social media in their purchasing process.  In B2B, unlike B2C, shear volume of brand exposures is rarely the objective.  We need to be talking to the right people.

If your content really has value, don’t be afraid to ask for something in return.  You will definitely drive down your hit count by asking a reader to register, but at least you will have generated a potential lead.  If you believe that your buyer can influence other buyers, think about using “Pay with a Tweet.”

The hyperbole is right, social media has permanently changed marketing.  But it’s a tool and a tool used for the wrong purpose can do more damage than good.

I LOVE your name!

As human beings, we place a high value on names and the act of naming. Throughout history, assigning a name to someone or something was seen as a serious responsibility (perhaps not for the parents of Hugh Cumber and Luke A. Myass). The act of naming also establishes ownership of something.  Owners name pets, boats, land, buildings, etc.  In fact, it was the implication of ownership that led ancient Jews to refuse to name their God.  Instead they came up with the tetragrammaton, the un-pronouncable symbolic representation of the name for the God of Israel. 

It is this concept of ownership and control that brings many points of view to the table when it comes time to name a product.  Marketing, engineering, product management, senior management, sales, legal and others will insist on being part of the naming process or worse, stay outside of the process and offer “really good ideas” for the naming team to consider. Naming is an area where everyone has an opinion and all opinions are thought to have equal merit. Far too often, the selection of a final product name is based on a group vote or a tie-breaker call by the most senior executive available. 

I am not suggesting that product naming be the singular domain of marketing or anyone else. It is absolutely appropriate to have multiple perspectives in the process and, like most things, the additional points of view will usually lead to a better end result. But be careful; the multiple viewpoints should be used to generate the objectives for the name, not the name itself.  The ability of a particular name to meet the objectives should be the only criteria for judging it, not whether the largest numbers of people “like” it. People will like or not like a name based on all sorts of irrelevant factors such as whether or not it reminds them of an ex-girl or boy friend.  Many times such associations are based on distant memories and we are not even conscious that they influence our feelings toward a name.  To this point, if your sole objective is getting a name everyone likes, you will never find one.

Rather than beginning the process with a blank white board and a group of people barking out potential names until the board is filled, start the process with your objectives. Here’s where the multiple perspectives can be very helpful, and it is critical that everyone get on the same page around what you want the name to do.  There will likely be multiple objectives for your product name and it is important that your objectives be prioritized.

Here are just a few things to consider when developing your naming objectives:

Descriptive vs. Exotic: During the early phase of the Internet it was very hip to choose an exotic name or to make up a word entirely.  As the Internet grew and search engine marketing became key to many products’ successes, the trend continued because it is obviously easier to own (from both trademark and SEO perspectives) a name no one else uses.  But over time, consumers have grown tired and frustrated with cute names that don’t mean anything. Do you need the name to communicate what the product does or will that be self-evident?

Trademark:  Obviously, you have to steer clear of trademark problems but sometimes you may not care if your product’s name can be protected (your trademark attorneys will probably disagree).  Let’s say for instance, that you invent a banana peeler and your primary objective for the name is that it instantly communicates what it does.  “The Banana Peeler” would be a natural choice but your trademark counsel will tell you it can’t be protected because it isn’t specific enough to your particular product.  But maybe you don’t care.  Maybe you want a whole category to gain traction and you are not worried if competitors bring their own banana peelers to market.  You can differentiate your product from competitive offerings with the name “The Banana Peeler by YourCo.” Assuming your company name is protected, it will be clear which is yours.

Relationship to Other Product Lines: Often I see product managers essentially marking their turf by creating a brand family around their products.  This strategy may or may not make sense depending on how the products relate to each other.  If the products under the branding umbrella all have a key, differentiating feature, it makes sense.  If however, your company desires to sell multi-product solutions from multiple product groups, the umbrella brand should identify all the pieces that go together to make a solution.  It is hard to do both. Remember Garanimals?  It was a line of children’s clothing that helped non-fashionista kids (and their parents) put together coordinated outfits by affixing animal emblems to every piece of clothing.  Pants with bears on them were to be worn with shirts with bears on them, the pants with giraffes with the shirts with giraffes, etc. You have to decide for your branding strategy whether you want the bear (your brand) to make an outfit or to identify all the things that are have the same differentiating feature: all clothes with your special wool have a sheep symbol, for instance.

Searchablility: As mentioned above, the more unique the name, the more likely you are to climb in organic search rankings.  Inevitably, there will be someone in your naming meetings that will Google every potential name and will proclaim, “Can’t use that, someone has it!”  But again, do you care?  How important is it that someone be able to “Google” the product name or that the product name is available as a top-level domain?  When answering this question, you have to consider things such as how important do you want your company name to be?  In my experience, there has been so much emphasis on driving product name recognition that the company name loses importance.  This might be okay if you’re like Unilever and you want product names to be the hero brands and the company brand is insignificant. But if this isn’t your overall strategy, maybe you don’t care if the product name can be searched without your company brand.

International: We all know the textbook stories about names that have gone bad when they go international such as the Chevy Nova (meaning “It doesn’t go” in Spanish).  Wikipedia claims there are roughly 7,300 spoken languages on the planet so finding a word that does not mean something else in some other language is next to impossible.  When determining your international objectives for a name, you have to narrow down where the name has to work and determine whether or not you can effectively use different names in different languages.  Just because a name fits all of your primary objectives but translates to something naughty in Tibet should not rule it out if you never plan to market in Tibet.

TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms): We have a strange habit of turning multiple word names – especially three name names – into acronyms.  A sociologist needs to study this and tell us if there is any way to prevent it.  Sometimes those giving product names do it purposely as a way to get more description into the name without taking up more space.  This is an interesting strategy but only effective if you put enough messaging effort into explaining the acronym as you do the name.  If Ford wants “XLT” to mean something when attached to their model names (e.g. Ford Ranger XLT) they have not been successful.  Here are some excerpts from online forums: “It means it’s the Eddie Bauer edition.” “It means it is better than the XLS.” “It means eXtremely Luxurious Truck.”  The Ford people may not care if we know what it means.  If the extra words are important to your naming strategy, be prepared to put some effort into making the meaning clear.

These are just a few of the possible objectives you could have when developing a new product name.   Like anything, the more objectives you have, the less likely you are to achieve any of them.  Choose those that are most important, prioritize, and then start your list! 

If you use a group to evaluate your names, make it a small group that can focus on a name’s ability to meet your objectives and resist the urge to judge based on liking them. After all, if a name meets your objectives, you will probably learn to like it. 

Just like Ima Roberts learned to love her new name when she married Eric Hogg.

Can I see a picture of your building?

An impeccably dressed account executive from a potential vendor fumbles with a laptop and projector at the front of the room as disinterested individuals from your company slide into chairs as far from the front as possible.  The account executive temporarily leaves the mass of tangled cords to great each new arrival with an ear-to-ear smile and fierce hand pumping.   The room gets increasingly uncomfortable as the presenter tries every combination of the Control, ALT and Function keys in an effort to change the screen image from solid blue to the image displayed on his laptop.  After a tired comment about "the technology not cooperating today," the presenter momentarily gives up, and the presentation title slide magically appears on the screen five seconds later. Nervous chuckles ensue. The title slide, with a low-res version of your logo stolen from your web site beside the vendor's logo is followed by the obligatory agenda that begins with "Introductions" and ends with "Next Steps."

And then it appears… the beauty shot of a building!  Glistening in the gentle glow of early morning or late afternoon sunshine, adorned with tightly cropped hedges and surrounded by a conspicuous lack of people and vehicles, the vendor’s corporate headquarters building adorns the screen under the banner “Company Background.” The vendor turns to the screen to take in the majesty of the moment as if they were looking at a picture of their own newborn child.

I have lived this scene dozens, if not hundreds of times as a potential customer.  The building slide along with other cliché slides such as the map with dots, a historical timeline, an extensive bullet list of company capabilities and a slide jammed with dozens of company logos (that almost certainly are being used without permission of the trademark owners) are key ingredients to something often referred to as the “generic company overview presentation.”  Every sales person believes that these presentations are as fundamental to the sales process as food and water are to life, and we marketers have reinforced this notion by creating and distributing these presentations. Admit it, there is a file on your hard drive right now called “Company Overview,” and it contains a picture of your building, doesn’t it? This beauty shot of the world headquarters of one of my previous companies was featured on the title slide of our corporate presentation when I was VP of Global Marketing, so I’m guilty as well.

Have you ever thought to challenge the conventional wisdom of the company overview presentation?  Have you ever noticed that the whole concept violates the fundamentals of marketing?  Specifically, it is said of marketing communication: “If you don’t understand to whom you are speaking, you are not communicating.” A “generic” overview presentation, by its very “gerneric-ness” means you don’t know your audience. Oh, I know, you have done your homework, you understand your target customer and their needs, but should you really use the same persona-based approach in a sales presentation that you would in a broader communication such as an advertisement?

Perhaps it’s important to get grounded in what an initial sales presentation is all about because it has changed significantly over time.  Gone are the days when sales people could get invited into a prospect to do a “dog and pony show” as a way of generating customer interest.  Using my own experience as a prospect and customer, I am not inviting someone in for a meeting just to see if they might have something I want to buy!  There are too many vendors, with too many specialties and I have too little time for this kind of approach.  A much more common scenario is inviting a small number of finalists in to address a specific need after I have done my homework narrowing the field to those companies that have the capability to help me and meet my criteria.  It is not hard to find out what I need to know so believe me, if I only want vendors with a significant local presence, you’ll never be invited in to talk to me if you don’t have it.  I don’t need to see your building in your presentation; I already saw it on your web site.

So skip the company information altogether? No!  What I’m suggesting is that you treat information as you would any other product or service benefit in a marketing communication – only use it if you can link it directly to a defined customer need. This is why you can’t create a “generic” company overview.  Not every prospect has a need for every benefit. In the days of hyper information and one to one marketing, prospects have little tolerance for sifting through your benefits to find those that apply to them.  Sorry, they expect us to do that for them. So that means we have to understand them and understand their needs before we start talking about our capabilities.

I love the analogy that Dick Anderson, the EVP of Sales when I was at Inacom, used to use to show what an overview presentation is like from the customer’s perspective:

Imagine going to a doctor because you have a severe pain in your knee. Upon arriving in the exam room, the doctor launches into his overview presentation. “Well, thank you for coming in today.  I am very excited about caring for your medical needs but before we get started I would like to tell you a little bit about my capabilities and myself. First, I was born in 1964 in Huntsville.  I attended Eastside elementary school where I studied grammar and introductory mathematics.  After elementary school I progressed to junior high and high school and eventually went on to the University where, after initially studying philosophy, I changed my major to pre-med as noted here on my timeline slide. After college I went to medical school. As an internist, I did extensive work studying respiratory systems.  I know that you are here today about your knee, but I wanted you to know about my other specialties in the event that you should have future needs. In addition to my practice here at the clinic, I practice at several other facilities around town as indicated by the dots on this map. I also practice at a hospital -- I have a picture of that hospital here!  Next, I have a slide with photographs of all the other patients I have served.  As you can see, in addition to serving people like you, I have extensive experience with people who are not like you.”

Ridiculous?  Speaking again as a prospect, many times I have had a clear issue such as an underperforming print vendor (my painful knee) and I have sat through presentations feeling just like the imaginary patient above – “How are you going to fix my problem?”

 
Convincing your sales team they don’t need the generic presentation will not be easy.  During a recent round of meetings with our Asia sales teams I suggested eliminating the building shot from the presentations and I was hammered with objections. “There are trade restrictions in this country that make it illegal to purchase products manufactured in certain other countries. We need to show that we have a factory in this country – it is a huge selling point!”

Let me get this straight, the fact that it is not illegal to buy our products is a huge selling point? Give the customer a little credit.  Given the risk, don’t you think they have already checked us out or, at minimum will raise the question if they are worried about it?  In any case, the picture of a building in that country does not prove anything.  The customer need is to not import products from certain countries. We meet that need, that’s all that needs to be said.  The picture of your building, while breathtaking, adds nothing.

Rather than creating these generic company overview presentations, I recommend creating a collection of individual slides, based on your company’s key differentiators. If you believe it is your product innovations, create a slide to make this point using your engineering staff size, your volume of patents, awards you have received, etc. as proof points.  The keys for these differentiators are that they all be phrased as a benefit to the customer – why do they care? Put yourself in the customer’s seat: “So you have 1,500 engineers and have won some awards, what problem does this solve for me?” If you can’t answer that question, odds are you are attempting to create a benefit where one does not really exist. It is not enough to be different from your competitors, that differentiation has to create a benefit for the customer.  You could even make the slide title force this question: “Why our innovation strength is important to [customer name].”

To make sure the collection of benefit slides does not morph into a generic presentation fill it with a good number of spots where the content must be customized.  This will be very annoying to your sales team! One or more of them will take the time to string all the benefits slides together into a single presentation and will “generic-ize” it by removing all the custom content. However, if you take the time to educate the team about why you have taken this approach, you will create at least a few converts.

If you really want to get really fancy and you have a resource to write some wicked macros, you could create a tool that asks the presenter a series of “what’s important to the customer?” questions and dynamically create a custom presentation based on the answers.  Someday I’m going to do this and it is going to be really cool!  Until then, the individual benefit slides will have to suffice.

So the next time you find yourself inserting a picture of a building into a presentation, be sure to ask yourself what benefit you are trying to communicate. Unless you are attempting to sell the building, your reasons probably don’t relate to your customers’ needs.